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Game Devs Only Use PhysX For the Money, Says AMD
arcticstoat writes "AMD has just aimed a shot at Nvidia's PhysX technology, saying that most game developers only implement GPU-accelerated PhysX for the money. AMD's Richard Huddy explained that 'Nvidia creates a marketing deal with a title, and then as part of that marketing deal, they have the right to go in and implement PhysX in the game.' However, he adds that 'the problem with that is obviously that the game developer doesn't actually want it. They're not doing it because they want it; they're doing it because they're paid to do it. So we have a rather artificial situation at the moment where you see PhysX in games, but it isn't because the game developer wants it in there.' AMD is pushing open standards such as OpenCL and DirectCompute as alternatives to PhysX, as these APIs can run on both AMD and Nvidia GPUs. AMD also announced today that it will be giving away free versions of Pixelux's DMM2 physics engine, which now includes Bullet Physics, to some game developers."
Sounds to me like AMD just wishes they'd thought of it first. There's no reason AMD couldn't offer similar deals.
If you noticed in the summary, AMD is advocating for a similar technology that works on their hardware as well as on nVidia's, seems like developers would prefer that for practical reasons.
"Flying boxes and wood splinters do not make a better game."
But dead guys laying 180 perpendicular off a cliff makes them awesome? Does no one here remember the good old days of early FPS where if you died on the edge of a ledge your body would lay flat over the edge? Does no one remember the time when you hit dead bodies with shots and they didn't move or flail around? What about mass effect 1 the anti-gravity at the end with the geth/dead bodies floating and flailing around, not cool at all?
All that is physics and yes the do make a better game WHEN they are applied to things that need them and not over-used, especially not using physics as a gimmick.
GPU makers are in a bind:
- IGP are now enough for 90% of users: office work (even w/ Aero), video, light gaming, dual-screen... all work fine with IGPs
- the remaining 10% (gamers, graphic artists) are dwindling for lack or outstanding games: game publishers are turned off by rampant piracy, mainly online games bring in big money nowadays
- GPGPU is useless except in scientific computing: we already have more x86 cores than the devs know how to use, let alone use a different computing paradigm
- devs have to target the lowest common denominator, which means no GPGPU for games
I'm actually think of moving my home PC to one of the upcoming ARM-based smarttops. They look good enough for torrenting + video watching + web browsing, consume 10 watts instead of 150...
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
Open standards always win out over closed standards. Like OpenGL -vs- DirectX.... oh... wait... :-P
Intel owns Havok (since 2007) and licenses it out all over the place. There's a page that has all the titles using it (http://www.havok.com/index.php?page=available-games) and it is not a small list. Havok also runs on the CPU exclusively (and will probably continue that way since Intel wants to sell quad cores) so works no matter what your graphics card.
It's also not just physics anymore, there's Havok animation libraries and so on.
Does no one remember the time when you hit dead bodies with shots and they didn't move or flail around?
Not everyone includes "pretty" in their "good game" equation. Doom can still hold it's own against modern games in terms of actual fun.
Clearly you don't get a kick out of shooting dead bodies and seeing them twitch.
What the hell's wrong with you?
XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
I've done some work with both PhysX and the things that AMD is pushing for. I try to keep with the Physics Abstraction Layer, which lets me plug in whatever physics engine as the backend, which gives a pretty damn good apples-to-apples performance metric. Personally, my ultimate choice of physics engine is the one which exhibits the best performance. My experience may differ from others, but I generally get the best performance from PhysX on with an nVidia GPU and BulletPhysics with an AMD GPU. Sometimes, the software version of PhysX outstrips the competition, but I have never seen anything beat PhysX in performance with GPU acceleration turned on. And with PAL, it is easy to check if there is GPU support on the machine and swap in the physics engine with the best performance (PAL is awesome).
Here's the thing: GPU-accelerated physics are just plain faster. Why? Because collision detection is a highly parallelizable problem. Guess what hardware we have that can help? The GPU. Another great part of using the GPU is that it frees the CPU to do more random crap (like AI or parsing the horribly slow scripting language).
AMD is working on both BulletPhysics and Havok so they can do GPU acceleration. But I have a feeling that PhysX performance will remain faster for a while: PhysX was designed to natively run on the GPU (technically, a GPU-like device), while these other libraries are not. Furthermore, nVidia has quite a head start in performance tuning, optimization and simple experience. In five years, that shouldn't matter, but I'm just saying that it will take a while.
So here is my message to AMD: If you want people to use your stuff, make something that works and let me test it out in my applications. You've released a demo of Havok with GPU acceleration. PhysX has been and continues to work with GPU acceleration on nVidia GPUs and will frequently outperform the software implementation. I'm all for open alternatives, but in this case, the open alternatives aren't good enough.
My UID is a prime number. Yeah, I planned that.
Nvidia is very anti-competitive and has been for a very long time.
The recent "making physx stop working when AMD gfx card is present" is just one of the more public outings of their unethical behavior.
I wish someone would expose all of their shenanigans and anti-competitive practices so people can realize how badly these things affect the industry and consumers (ugh, hate that word).
The most recent thing I read about their practices is from the upcoming PC game, Just Cause 2. There's a trailer showing off Nvidia-only effects ...(something which is dead standard DirectX code) and artificially blocking out AMD/others from getting the benefits. The Batman Arkham Asylam scandal was one more people may recall. They claim (and their users/shills) that TWIMTBP is just "marketing"... more like bribery and blocking out the competition. They've been caught on many occasions but the public rarely sees anything negative about them.
Nvidia is the Intel/Microsoft of the video card industry but unlike them, isn't quite as dominant (thankfully for us) but they still do a hell of a lot of damage. (The Jupiter of the computer industry... too small to become a sun but still an 800 quadrillion ton gorilla).
I've stopped buying Nvidia cards since the Geforce 2. At that time for performance reasons but since then I vote with my wallet and let others know to support fair and legal competition.
Science : Proprietary , Knowledge : Open Source
A friend told me about his experience with Utopia. It implemented GPU-accelerated physics in one of recent patches. But try hard as you wish, he failed to notice any difference for weeks of gameplay. Until he entered the central city. With flags by the entrance fluttering smoothly in the wind, instead of the old static animation.
Yep, that's it. Many megabytes of a patch, a game of hundreds of miles of terrain, hundreds of locations, battles, vehicles, all that stuff... and physics acceleration is used to flutter flags by the entrance.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
We don't have any proof that developers don't want PhysX. What we have is spokes person from company A saying that no one wants company B's technology. There are no scientifically obtained statistics only one guy's - a competitor - opinion.
Nor did the article state *why* it may be unwanted, or any specific why-nots for using PhysX
I have to disable PhysX in the nVidia control panel to get HL2 or any of the Source engine games to run properly! I had no idea what was causing these games to crash. After disabling PhysX they work right every time!
Apparently it doesn't do anything crucial or even noticable as my games run just fine with it turned off. And now I'm told the game devs don't even want to use it?
This "feature" has caused me nothing but grief!